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Three Pillars of Optimum Health

I like to think of wellness as needing three pillars to stand on its own, or three legs of a stool if that image works better for you. The three pillars are:

Diet and Nutrition

Fitness

Brain Health

The Diet and Nutrition pillar is obvious. If we don’t put the good stuff in, we don’t get the good results we want.

Fitness doesn’t mean running a lot of miles, lifting hundreds of pounds of weights or working out for hours in the gym. It means engaging in the right physical activity — and the right kind of rest — to get the maximum results in terms of heart and lung health in the shortest time. Because I really hate exercise.

The fitness program I’m working with, and that I recommend strongly, is called PACE. You can read about it here.

Brain Health is important, but most of the time we overlook it.

Your brain is a supercomputer. Think about how a supercomputer would work if it overheated all the time and if its power supply was erratic. It would not perform well, to say the very least. More likely it would freak out and give bizarre and unexpected answers before it exploded!

If your brain isn’t healthy, it doesn’t send and receive the right signals, putting your whole body at risk. An unhealthy brain can screw up your digestion, your reproductive system, cause you to lose voluntary muscle control, and a whole lot of other nasty stuff. It can also make you feel really, really awful.

Brain health is not the same as emotional health, but if your brain is healthy some emotional issues will disappear, or at least become more manageable.